Cost: Entry cost is $1 for children under 5; $25 for ages 6 to 17; $35 for ages 18 to 54; and $25 for ages 55 and above. Proceeds benefit Aubree and Kaylee Adams.

Deadlines: 8 p.m. today is last day to register online and get a T-shirt. People can register online until 5 p.m. Friday, May 11, but will not receive a shirt. People also can sign up until the morning of the event by filling out the form. They will not receive a shirt.

LONGMONT -- Kaylee Adams climbs in her bed, snuggles under a blanket and folds her arms across her stomach. Her twin sister, Aubree Adams, flops down at the foot of the bed.

Most nights it's a comedy routine: Aubree recalls inside jokes, pokes fun at herself, plays embarrassing home movies on the iPad -- anything to keep Kaylee's mind off the unpleasant, sometimes scary, feeling of having dialysate pumped into her body.

"Sometimes, when I'm having a bad time, it just makes it easier," Kaylee said.

The 15-year-old twins, both sophomores at Longmont High School, have focal segmental glomerulosclerosis, or FSGS, a rare disease that can lead to kidney failure.

In Kaylee's case, it already has. After being hospitalized last year, her kidneys function at about 15 percent. In need of a kidney transplant, she spends eight hours each night on in-home peritoneal dialysis, which removes waste and extra water in her body while she sleeps.

Her sister's kidneys have the opposite problem. They're working at about 420 percent and could fail at any time.

"She's a ticking time bomb," said the twins' mother, Linda Adams.

Aubree doesn't worry about her health, at least not right now.

"I just feel pretty good. Maybe soon I'll think about it. But not now. I'm just living it up," she said.

'You're not alone'

The twins are the beneficiaries of this year's Happy Smackah 5K Fun Run/Walk on May 12. The fundraiser started last year to benefit Westview Middle School science teacher Dan Cribby, who lost an arm to necrotizing fasciitis. A school resource officer nominated the girls, who both attended Westview. Event proceeds will go to medical expenses.

Medicare covers the cost of Kaylee's dialysis, but Linda estimated that she spends about $1,500 monthly on the girls' medications. Kaylee takes 19 pills a day, and both take medication for hypertension, one of the symptoms of FSGS.

Another symptom is swelling in the hands, feet and face. It was the puffiness that first indicated something was amiss.

Last fall, Kaylee's feet, heavy with water retention, swelled until the plastic bands of her flip-flops cut in her skin. Her stomach distended and her neck ballooned.

Lab results from an annual checkup at The Children's Hospital in Aurora showed that her kidneys were on the road to failure. Kaylee spent three weeks in the hospital. Much thinner -- she dropped down to 78 pounds in the hospital -- she returned home from the hospital in late September.

She didn't come back to school until after winter break, but Aubree filled her in on what she was missing: homework, who was dating whom and breaking gossip news.

Aubree Adams, left, and her twin sister Kaylee laugh after messing up one of their secret handshakes while working on homework in their Longmont home on April 25. The twins will be the beneficiaries of the Second Annual Happy Smackah 5K Fun Run/Walk on May 12. To watch a video and see more photos of the twins, visit www.timescall.com.
(
Greg Lindstrom
)

Even though the teenagers have had to grow up in the past few months, their mother tries to treat them the same way she did before Kaylee's kidney failure.

"I want to try to make their lives no different than if they didn't have this kidney disease. So they get treated like regular kids," she said.

The girls and their older brother, Gunnar, 18, take turns doing household chores. Curfew on weekdays is 10 p.m. -- that's partly because Kaylee needs to be hooked up to dialysis for at least eight hours -- and gets extended to 11 p.m. on weekends.

Both twins are part of Longmont High's soccer team. Aubree plays on the varsity team, and Kaylee, who played before her dialysis, is a team manager.

Aubree Adams, left, tears up while explaining how she couldn't be separated from her sister, Kaylee, during a trip to the hospital when Kaylee's kidneys began failing.
(
Greg Lindstrom
)

Up until last summer, the twins shared a bedroom. Now, their rooms are next door to each other. Still, if Kaylee needs her sister at night, she talks to her on an iPhone app that works like a walkie-talkie.

It helps to have a built-in partner for dealing with the disease.

"It's just easier. You always have somebody there. You're not alone," Kaylee said.

Looking forward

Until a transplant, Kaylee will stay on dialysis. Peritoneal dialysis relies on a thin membrane in the stomach, called the peritoneum. It acts like a filter to clear waste and fluid from the body through a catheter. Each night, 9,600 milliliters of sugar water are pumped into Kaylee's body, and then drained, along with any other substances to get her electrolytes levels back to normal.

Last month, the family filled out the paperwork to apply for a kidney. They expect the process to take at least a year.

While the family now knows what to expect when Aubree's kidneys fail, Kaylee said she's still scared for her sister.

"I don't want her to go through what I went through," Kaylee said. "Because you shouldn't have to."

Sometimes, Kaylee gets tired of the questions, the concern and the attention.

One of the twin's best friends, Longmont High sophomore Lili Spendlow, 15, said she was afraid to hurt Kaylee when she first left the hospital. She looked frail, and Spendlow appointed herself Kaylee's bodyguard in the school hallways.

"At first, I asked her if it hurt. And what can I do to help?" Spendlow said.

MacIntyre says the completed project will be best in Pac-12There were bulldozers, hard hats, mud, concrete trucks, blueprints, mud, cranes, lots of noise and, uh, mud, during the last recruiting cycle when Colorado football coach Mike MacIntyre brought recruits to campus. Full Story

MacIntyre says the completed project will be best in Pac-12There were bulldozers, hard hats, mud, concrete trucks, blueprints, mud, cranes, lots of noise and, uh, mud, during the last recruiting cycle when Colorado football coach Mike MacIntyre brought recruits to campus. Full Story

Most people don't play guitar like Grayson Erhard does. That's because most people can't play guitar like he does. The guitarist for Fort Collins' Aspen Hourglass often uses a difficult two-hands-on-the-fretboard technique that Eddie Van Halen first popularized but which players such as Erhard have developed beyond pop-rock vulgarity.
Full Story